A Paragraph A Day About My Game Collection - Day 179

Lure of the Temptress

This was one of the rare adventure games not made by Sierra or LucasArts, a couple of guys in England had played the Sierra games and found them wanting so they decided to make their own, game engine and all, and this was the first one. They also made Beneath A Steel Sky and the Broken Sword games, the first two of that series using this same engine. Adventure games by this point were getting a bit silly, since finding a keyhole usually meant searching for a key or a nailed shut window needed a hammer or prybar the makers decided to get creative in order to up the difficulty. Now instead of a key you might have to find a frog who would eat a fly that kept you from entering a room with a candle where you would drip wax onto a mold of a key that you found in a well which you would then be able to take to a witch who could change if from wax to iron thus giving you the key to unlock the door. It did up the difficulty, but by going into realms of insanity it made any given bit of the game ludicrous and comical and detracted from the overall story. While the title implies a lot more than the game gives, Lure of the Temptress was an attempt to get back to telling an interactive adventure story without wandering off into the bizarre just to extend gameplay. That did not mean a lack of humor by any means, just that it was intentional and part of the game instead of incidental. The other cool bit was that the engine they created, dubbed 'Virtual Theater', was the first to allow NPC characters to do things in the background. Up to this point in gaming, if your character was not doing something all the rest of the game characters were passively waiting in the wings for you to show up. The guy at the fish stand would always be there waiting for you to buy that fish, regardless of when in the game you showed up. Now we take for granted that at midnight we can rob a store blind in Skyrim since the owner is asleep, but back in the day they were tireless automatons who never shirked their duties and would only leave if given the proper prompt via gameplay and then only if it was written so. Otherwise they were deathless sentinels ever guarding the 16 color rack of vegetables from your thieving fingers. This game allowed them to get some sleep once in awhile, and incidentally allowed another avenue for puzzle making by adding time as a factor as well. Since they released it as freeware back in 2003, you can pick it up for free at GOG.com and see another good example of adventure gaming from it's heyday.